


trapped

by kihyuks



Category: Monsta X (Band)
Genre: Fluff, Getting to Know Each Other, Kinda?, M/M, Museums, Painting, Time Travel, hyunwoo is a security guard at a museum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-07
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-18 03:00:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28610958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kihyuks/pseuds/kihyuks
Summary: hyunwoo discovers a painting at his new job that intrigues him—especially when it seems to move.
Relationships: Lee Minhyuk/Son Hyunwoo | Shownu
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23





	trapped

Museums at night are far, far different than they are during the day. 

Visiting different museums all over the world has become a bit of a hobby for Hyunwoo, something that he enjoys to do whenever he has the time for it. Seeing all of the different artefacts and paintings always interests him and he loves to learn about objects from all over the world. 

So, when a security guard position had opened up at his local museum, Hyunwoo had jumped at the opportunity. He’d been hired quickly and easily and he couldn’t have been more excited to start his new job. 

Actually being here in the museum alone without the hustle and bustle, without the constant noise and chatter with the lights off is a far eerier and different experience than being here during the day, but Hyunwoo’s still excited nonetheless. 

He’s been dropped into the deep end a bit, as he’d been given a quick training period earlier on in the day, but they have no other security guards working here (hence why they’d hired him so quickly) so he mostly just has to figure everything out on his own. 

He doesn’t mind it, though. Not really. He’s always been one of those people who learns better by doing, so this is perfect for him, to be honest. He doesn’t have the pressure of someone breathing down his neck checking to see if he’s got it right, he can take his time to learn the ropes. 

It’s not like there’s really much to do, anyway. His boss warned him that it’s a rather boring job as not all that much ever happens, but a necessary one. 

But how can a job be boring with so many different rooms filled with countless artefacts for him to discover? 

This being his local museum, Hyunwoo’s been here more times than he’s been to any others, but there’s just so much to see that he discovers many new things every time he visits, and he has no doubts that it’ll be the same when he wanders throughout the nights. 

He’s given free rein of the entire building—he has to have it to do his job—including the back rooms where new items are stored before they’re moved out on display, so he even gets a sneak peak at what’s to come. 

All in all, Hyunwoo thinks he loves his job already, and it’s only his first night here. 

So far, he’s explored through his favourite room in the whole museum, the room filled with paintings from local artists. Whenever he comes here during the day, he always finds himself spending hours upon hours in the art gallery, admiring all of the paintings as if it’s his first time ever seeing them. He doesn’t know what it is, but he finds himself always drawn to that specific room. 

Curious, Hyunwoo decides to check out the back rooms for all the new pieces to see if they have any new art. It helps him to make a full mental map of the museum if he explores the back rooms is the excuse he tells himself, as he only currently knows his way around the main rooms from exploring them so many times in his free time. 

Unlike the actual display rooms of the museum, the back rooms have an ominous feeling to them. Even in the dark, there’s something magical and special to Hyunwoo about the display rooms, but back here where things aren’t yet set up for display, he feels uneasy. 

He can’t explain why, because really there’s no difference between these and the other rooms other than these ones not yet being set up for display. 

Hyunwoo gets the distinct feeling that he’s being watched as he walks around the room, but he tries to shake it off. He tells himself that it’s just because he’s not yet familiar with the area back here, so of course it’s going to take some getting used to, especially as the lights are dimmer than the ones in the main area of the museum. 

He just needs to work here for a bit longer, and it’ll feel like nothing unusual to him anymore. 

With his torch held out in front of him as if it’s a potential weapon, Hyunwoo walks slowly through the rooms, checking every corner for potential intruders. 

Logically, there will be no one else here and he knows that. The daytime security does a full sweep of the museum before Hyunwoo comes in, and it’s his first night on the job, so things can’t really go all that wrong. 

Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t spot anyone lurking in the shadows, but he does come across something else that catches his eye—a painting. 

The painting is quite standard for the types of paintings you see in a museum—it’s an oil painting of a man. He appears to be pressed up against some glass, as if he’s trapped. 

It intrigues Hyunwoo, for reasons he can’t quite place. Maybe it’s the emotion in the piece—he can see the fear in the man’s eyes. While he knows it’s simply a piece of art, he can’t help but feel sorry for the man. 

To be trapped in such a way must be horrible. 

After a few minutes of admiring the painting, Hyunwoo finally moves on, but throughout the rest of the night the painting stays on his mind. 

He can’t wait for the day it’s finally on display so he can see it in its full glory. 

* * *

The first few weeks of Hyunwoo’s job pass by in a flash, and he settles into a routine quite quickly and easily. 

He even ends up befriending one of the daytime security guards—Hoseok—and they end up chatting whenever they do the changeover together, which is nice and Hyunwoo’s glad to have made a friend. 

The back rooms don’t grow any less creepy over the course of Hyunwoo’s short time there, and he’s starting to wonder if they ever will. Maybe they’re just creepy rooms, and he’ll have to just accept that. 

One night, he finds himself wandering the back rooms once again. It’s a habit he can’t break—he doesn’t enjoy being back there, but he ends up wandering around night after night anyway. 

In the month that Hyunwoo’s been working at the museum, nothing much has really changed in regards to the stock that’s stored back there. A few new pieces have come in, and some have been moved from storage to out on display, but all in all it hasn’t really changed all that much. 

There’s that one painting there that he finds himself coming back to over and over again—‘Trapped’ as he likes to refer to it, the real name of it unknown to Hyunwoo. 

Oftentimes he finds himself sitting there for a long part of his shift, simply admiring the painting. 

Whenever he looks at it, it feels like he finds new details he never noticed before, and so he keeps getting drawn back to it again and again and again. 

Today is no different. He sits down in front of the painting and he just looks at it. 

Except—there is something different. Although it makes no sense, Hyunwoo is  _ convinced _ that the man in the painting has turned his head ever so slightly to the left. 

It’s very subtle, so subtle that it would be impossible to notice for most people, but because Hyunwoo’s been studying this painting so hard for the past month, he sees the difference. 

He stares at it for a long, long time, trying to convince himself that he’s misremembering, but he knows that he isn’t. Somehow, the painting has moved. 

Unsettled, Hyunwoo leaves the back rooms, a shiver running down his spine. 

For the rest of his shift, he can’t stop thinking about the painting, but he doesn’t dare go back and look at it. 

* * *

“Have you ever seen the stuff they keep in the backrooms?” Hyunwoo asks Hoseok one day. He’s arrived early for his shift so that he can talk to Hoseok a bit, as he often does. 

“I’ve seen some of it,” Hoseok says. “Why? Something caught your eye?”

“There’s this painting and it’s… weird. I don’t know how to explain it,” Hyunwoo says. How does he describe a painting that appears to have changed whenever Hyunwoo sees it?

Hoseok leans forward, interested. “Go on. I’m intrigued.”

“It looks like a man is trapped in it. Do you know it?”

Hoseok appears to think for a moment then snaps his fingers together. “I think I know the one, yeah. Dark colours? Looks like it belongs in an old creepy mansion?”

Hyunwoo nods. “That’s the one. Know anything about it?”

“I mean, I’ve heard rumours it’s haunted, but you hear that about every painting that ends up in a museum,” Hoseok says. “You could look into the artist. That usually gives you some information about it.”

“I’ll give that a try. Thanks, Hoseok.”

And so later that night—well, more like morning with how late Hyunwoo works—he forgo s sleep to try and look into the painting a bit. 

He’d managed to find the name of the artist during his shift—Chae Hyungwon—so he googles him to see what comes up. 

The information he finds isn’t much. Chae Hyungwon was an artist who lived over 100 years ago and most of his works have gone missing over the years. Strange, yes, but it’s not much to really go off of. 

Hyunwoo tries digging a little deeper, but doesn’t find anything of note. 

It’s only when he’s about to give up and get some sleep that he comes across a page about a painting—Trapped—and Hyunwoo knows he’s hit the jackpot. 

According to the website, Trapped (Hyunwoo’s guess of the name was incredibly accurate, it turns out) was a painting made by Hyungwon of his lover, Minhyuk, to forever capture his likeness. 

However, there have been rumours over the years that not only did Hyungwon paint Minhyuk to preserve his image forever, he somehow managed to trap Minhyuk inside the painting. 

Hyunwoo laughs when he reads it at the pure absurdity of it. Trapping someone inside a painting? That’s ridiculous and impossible. 

And yet, as Hyunwoo tries to get some sleep, he can’t stop thinking about the possibility that there’s a shred of truth to the story. 

* * *

Hyunwoo feels ridiculous, but he’s doing what he feels he has to do to get this absurd story off his mind. 

It’s 2am, about halfway through his shift, and Hyunwoo’s found himself sitting in the back rooms, his torch held in front of him shining on Trapped, the painting. 

He can’t believe he’s doing this, he really can’t, but Hyunwoo takes a deep breath and then says aloud, “Minhyuk? Are you trapped in there?”

If anyone else were watching him right now, they’d probably be in tears laughing at him. By far, this is the most ridiculous thing Hyunwoo’s ever done, but the story of Chae Hyungwon trapping his lover inside a painting hasn’t left his mind since he read it. 

There’s no reply from Minhyuk—huge shocker there—but Hyunwoo isn’t ready to give up just yet. If there really is a man trapped inside this painting, Hyunwoo wants to get him out. 

“Can you hear me?” Hyunwoo asks. He mentally thanks whoever installed the security cameras that the ones in the back rooms are terrible quality so if anyone ends up coming across the footage of Hyunwoo back here, they won’t really be able to tell what he’s doing. 

And by that he means talking to a painting. 

God, Jooheon and Changkyun are going to have the time of their lives when Hyunwoo tells them this is what he spends his nights doing. 

While Hyunwoo is distracted thinking about how his life choices led him to this moment, the painting moves. He doesn’t see it move, but one second Minhyuk was looking slightly to the left, and now he’s looking directly at Hyunwoo. 

Hyunwoo feels a shiver run down his spine. It could just be a trick of his eyes—it’s such a subtle movement—but Hyunwoo knows that Minhyuk is listening now. 

Where does he go from here? He wants to help Minhyuk, to save him from being trapped, but it’s not like there’s some handbook on what to do when you find someone from over 100 years ago trapped inside a painting, which sucks because it’d come in super handy right now. 

“How do I get you out of there?” Hyunwoo asks. 

Nothing happens inside the painting—or so it appears. It’s only when Hyunwoo really focuses on the painting a few minutes later that he realises that Minhyuk  _ has _ moved, but his movements are so slow that it’s impossible for Hyunwoo to see them while they’re happening. 

He’s looking towards the right now, and his hand on the right is turned ever so slightly too. 

Hyunwoo picks up the painting and scans the right side of it, but he can’t see anything. Even when comparing it to the left side, nothing looks amiss. 

“I don’t know what you want,” Hyunwoo says. 

He still can’t quite believe that he’s doing this—that he’s talking to a literal painting. 

To be fair, Hyunwoo didn’t get much sleep between this shift and his last shift, so there’s a huge possibility that he’s hallucinating this whole thing. At least if that’s the case Hyunwoo has an embarrassing yet funny story to tell people. 

Minhyuk hasn’t moved at all. Hyunwoo waits even longer, almost ten minutes, but there’s no movement. He keeps his gaze pointed to the right side of the painting. 

Hyunwoo groans in frustration. It would be so much easier if he could just  _ talk _ to Minhyuk to find out what he has to do to get him out of there, but that’s not possible, apparently. 

When Hyunwoo picks up the painting once again, he hears the slightest noise from it. To double check, he shakes the painting ever so gently, and sure enough, there’s something moving around inside it. 

Carefully, Hyunwoo flips the painting over to the back. He scans the torch over the entire back panel, and finds a very subtle and easy to miss smaller panel. He tries to pry it open, but it doesn’t budge. 

Hyunwoo squints at it. What could he do to open it? He doesn’t want to use force and risk damaging the painting, because not only would that get him in trouble with the museum, but that could hurt Minhyuk.

Hyunwoo realises how ridiculous it sounds, worrying about hurting a painted image, but he just  _ knows _ that there’s an actual human being trapped inside there. 

Completely on accident, Hyunwoo ends up pushing against the panel  _ just _ right and it slides open. On the inside is simply a slip of paper, which Hyunwoo pulls out. He checks thoroughly, but nothing else is there. 

Hyunwoo checks the paper and finds written on it something in a language he doesn’t know. He stares at it for a long time, wondering what the purpose of this is. 

When Hyunwoo looks back at Minhyuk in the painting again, he finds his mouth open ever so slightly. 

And somehow, Hyunwoo knows what he means. 

He looks down at the paper again and reads it aloud. His pronunciation is probably terrible, but Hyunwoo can only do his best. 

With the strange sentence on the paper now read, Hyunwoo looks at the painting one again, only to find that where Minhyuk once stood is now an empty space. 

“Hi,” comes a voice from behind him.

Hyunwoo whips his head around and finds Minhyuk—the man from the painting—standing before him. If Hyunwoo’s honest, when he saw Minhyuk in the painting part of what drew him to it was how beautiful Minhyuk is, but that doesn’t even come close to how beautiful Minhyuk is in person. 

While the artist—Chae Hyungwon, he reminds himself—had done an amazing job at capturing Minhyuk’s likeness, he just hadn’t quite captured all of the beauty that encompasses the real Minhyuk. 

“Hello,” Hyunwoo says, then promptly shuts his mouth again, because what are you supposed to say to (1) a beautiful man standing before you and (2) the man you just somehow brought out of a painting?

Hyunwoo really,  _ really _ needs a handbook on how to navigate unusual circumstances that he seems to find himself in more and more often in his life. 

“Thank you for getting me out of there,” Minhyuk says, sitting down on the floor in front of Hyunwoo so that they’re at eye level. “When Hyungwon said he’d be able to let me see the future, this wasn’t what I expected. I thought I’d fall asleep and wake up in the future or something, but no. I’ve been conscious this whole time and it’s  _ sucked _ .”

Hyunwoo stares at Minhyuk, because he’s just amazed that he actually  _ exists _ and was trapped inside a painting for so many years. 

“Do I have something on my face? Did Hyungwon get a smudge on me or something?”

Hyunwoo quickly shakes his head. “No, sorry, I’m just processing all of this.”

“Oh, yeah. It must be weird, right?”

Hyunwoo nods. “Very weird. I kinda never completely believed any of it until I saw you standing right in front of me and now I’m just—wow. This is a lot.”

Minhyuk smiles. “I get it. You work here, right?”

“I’m the night security guard, yeah.”

“You can get back to your job if you want. I can just sit around to pass the time.”

“Actually, I don’t really do a lot. There is something I’ll need your help with, though,” Hyunwoo says. 

“What is it?”

Hyunwoo points at the security camera in the corner of the room, pointed directly at the two of them. “We need to erase the footage, because if anyone sees you’re in here I’m going to get in trouble.”

Minhyuk stares at him as if he’s speaking a foreign language. “What?”

“Oh my god,” Hyunwoo says, realisation dawning over him at once. “You’re from the past. Of course you don’t know about cameras.”

Minhyuk continues to stare at him in complete confusion. 

“Come on,” Hyunwoo says, standing. “I’ll teach you a thing or two about the 21st century.”

* * *

At the end of Hyunwoo’s shift and after some awkward paths taken to avoid Minhyuk being seen on any of the security cameras after deleting the footage, Hyunwoo decides to bring Minhyuk back to his flat with him. 

He can’t just leave him out on the street, and as the person who got Minhyuk free from the painting (Hyunwoo’s still not sure how he’s going to explain the suddenly huge missing part of the painting in the museum, but that’s an issue for another day) Hyunwoo feels responsible for him. 

It’s not much of a burden on him, anyway, because he has a spare unused bedroom. It’s no trouble to allow Minhyuk to stay here for as long as he needs while he adjusts to life in a completely different century than the one he was born and lived in. He tells this to Minhyuk on the drive home and Minhyuk had insisted that he’ll find a way to pay Hyunwoo back somehow, probably by getting a job.

That’s going to be something that’ll take a while to figure out, Hyunwoo thinks, because Minhyuk doesn’t legally exist in this century, but that can be dealt with another day. 

Right now, Hyunwoo wants to get some sleep. So, that’s what he does. 

When he wakes up later, he finds Minhyuk sitting on the floor in the living room staring intensely at the TV, which is turned off, so Hyunwoo can’t help but wonder what it is that’s so interesting to Minhyuk. 

“Are you okay?” Hyunwoo asks. 

Minhyuk turns to look at him. “I don’t understand what it is,” he says, gesturing to the TV. “What does it do?”

“You watch things on it,” Hyunwoo says, unsure of how to explain things that are so normal to him to someone who’s never seen them before. 

“Like the security cameras?”

“Kinda. It’s more usually, uh, how do I explain this?  You know how people perform plays and act out stories? Well, TV is similar to that but you can watch people act them out wherever you are in the world.”

Minhyuk stares at him. “That’s possible?”

Hyunwoo can’t help but laugh at that. “You were magically stored inside a painting for over 100 years and you’re shocked by a television.”

Minhyuk pouts. “I don’t even know how the whole painting thing worked. I just agreed to it.”

“Why did you?” Hyunwoo can’t help but ask. He’s curious about Minhyuk’s story. He knows a little about it from what he read online, but hearing it straight from Minhyuk is completely different. 

“I don’t know, really,” Minhyuk says. “I guess I was curious and Hyungwon said he wanted to try it on me before he did the same to himself.”

Well, that wasn’t what Hyunwoo expected to hear. “Hyungwon trapped himself in a painting too?”

“That was his plan, but whether or not he did it I don’t know. I hope so, though.”

There’s another question Hyunwoo is desperate to ask, but he’s not sure if it’s too personal. But, well, he has someone from the past standing right in front of him that’s spent over 100 years inside a painting, so, really, what does Hyunwoo have to lose?

“Was Hyungwon your lover?” Hyunwoo questions. 

Minhyuk laughs—loudly and freely. “God, no. He was just my friend. I might like men, but Hyungwon was never one of them.”

Hyunwoo stores away that bit of information. “Every piece of information I’d found claimed you two were lovers.”

“We told our close friends and family that, but it wasn’t true,” Minhyuk explains. “Hyungwon didn’t want to be with anyone, but that wasn’t even considered as a possibility. It felt easier to explain he wasn’t into women and was with me than to explain that he wasn’t into anyone at all.”

Hyunwoo nods. He’s not sure he quite understands that logic, but, well, he’s not going to question it. It apparently made sense to Minhyuk and Hyungwon, anyway. 

“Anyway, I really can’t thank you enough for letting me stay with you. And, you know, saving me from that painting.”

“It’s not a problem at all,” Hyunwoo says. “I couldn’t just leave you trapped in there or abandon you once you got free.”

“Well, you could’ve, but you didn’t.” Minhyuk smiles. “Can you show me how this magic play box works?”

“Sure. I’ll show you some quality content that you’ve missed out on being trapped inside that painting,” Hyunwoo says, already wondering what to put on. 

He decides to let Minhyuk decide on a movie based on the cover and title alone and for some reason Minhyuk ends up picking Shrek, so they spend the whole day watching the Shrek movies together. 

* * *

For someone who’s never lived in this century, Minhyuk seems to adapt well and settle into modern life rather easily. There are things he just doesn’t like at all (such as phones, which he makes his dislike of known whenever he comes across one) but overall Minhyuk seems to have an easy time settling in, which makes Hyunwoo’s life easier too. 

Minhyuk living with Hyunwoo feels like both a huge change to his life and also completely familiar at the same time. It’s strange, really, and hard for Hyunwoo to explain, how easily Minhyuk fits into his life and how he goes from not really having a whole lot to do with his time outside of work to all his free time being filled with Minhyuk. 

And with all that time together over the past few weeks, Hyunwoo’s found himself slowly but surely falling for Minhyuk. 

It comes completely unexpected to Hyunwoo—he hasn’t had feelings for anyone in a long time—and he doesn’t quite know what to do about it. 

Before Minhyuk came along, the thought of a relationship wasn’t all too appealing to Hyunwoo. He was completely content being alone and having his friends by his side, but now he’s starting to reconsider that stance. 

It turns out, Hyunwoo doesn’t have to worry all that much about what to do, because Minhyuk ends up making the first move. 

“I bought you something,” Minhyuk says when Hyunwoo walks through the front door after his shift. 

He’s exhausted and was planning to go to bed and pass out the second he got home, but for Minhyuk he can stay awake a little longer. 

“What is it?” Hyunwoo asks, noticing that Minhyuk has his hand hidden behind his back. 

Minhyuk reveals the present he’s bought—a huge bunch of roses. 

Hyunwoo stares. “Roses?”

He doesn’t notice how his confusion comes across as ungratefulness until he sees the way Minhyuk’s face falls and how he lets the flowers drop slightly. 

Hyunwoo is quick to try and remedy his mistake. “I love them, really, I’m just confused and my tired brain can’t keep up.”

“I don’t really know how things are done in this time, but in that movie we watched yesterday the guy bought the girl a bunch of roses to show that he liked her and so…” Minhyuk trails off and holds the roses out to Hyunwoo again. 

Hyunwoo takes the roses and smells them, inhaling the floral aroma, and only then do the words that Minhyuk’s said truly process in his mind. 

“Wait. You like me?”

“Well, yeah,” Minhyuk says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “I thought the fact I got you roses would’ve given it away immediately, but guess not.”

Hyunwoo blinks slowly. “I am much too tired to properly have this conversation,” he says honestly, “but I like you too. A lot. And thank you for the flowers. I think I’m going to have to sleep now, though.” Hyunwoo can feel himself dozing off where he stands. 

“Go get some sleep,” Minhyuk says, shooing Hyunwoo away and grabbing the roses back before they fall to the floor. 

Hyunwoo stumbles his way into his room and passes out the second he falls into his bed (fully clothed still, of course). 

A few hours later when Hyunwoo rises again, he’s almost convinced that the conversation with Minhyuk was simply a dream, but then he walks into the living room and spots the roses sitting in a vase on the coffee table and realises that conversation did, in fact, actually occur. 

Which means Hyunwoo’s feelings are reciprocated. 

Minhyuk is fast asleep on the sofa, the TV controller in his hand and his mouth hanging open, and Hyunwoo just feels so  _ fond _ when he looks at him. 

He tries to sneak past Minhyuk so he can go get a glass of water from the kitchen, but Minhyuk ends up waking up. 

“I was waiting up for you,” he says, stifling a yawn. 

Hyunwoo smiles. “I see it didn’t go as planned.”

Minhyuk pouts at him. 

“Thank you for trying anyway,” Hyunwoo says. “And about what we kinda talked about earlier before I went to sleep.” He doesn’t continue, hoping Minhyuk will take the lead. 

“We like each other,” Minhyuk says simply. “That’s enough for me.”

“Can I call you my boyfriend now?” Hyunwoo asks. 

“If you kiss me,” Minhyuk answers, a shy smile on his face. 

Hyunwoo leans over and pecks Minhyuk’s lips, too shy to do more, but he feels his cheeks burning even from that. 

Both of them smile at each other, equal shy looks on their face, and Hyunwoo thanks his past self for insisting on finding out more about that painting so that it brought him and Minhyuk together. 

**Author's Note:**

> kudos & comments appreciated!!!
> 
> twitter: [@changkihyks](http://twitter.com/changkihyks/)  
> cc: [changkihyks](https://curiouscat.me/changkihyks?t=1559413679/)


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